Network equilibrium of heterogeneous congestion control protocols

— When heterogeneous congestion control protocols that react to different pricing signals share the same network, the resulting equilibrium may no longer be interpreted as a solution to the standard utility maximization problem. We prove the existence of equilibrium under mild assumptions. Then we show that multi-protocol networks whose equilibria are locally non-unique or infinite in number can only form a set of measure zero. Multiple locally unique equilibria can arise in two ways. First, unlike in the single-protocol case, the set of bottleneck links can be non-unique with heterogeneous protocols even when the routing matrix has full row rank. The equilibria associated with different sets of bottleneck links are necessarily distinct. Second, even when there is a unique set of bottleneck links, network equilibrium can still be non-unique, but is always finite and odd in number. They cannot all be locally stable unless it is globally unique. Finally, we provide various sufficien...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Ao Tang, Jiantao Wang, Steven H. Low, Mung Chiang
• Keywords: Bottleneck Links, Communications, Heterogeneous Congestion Control, INFOCOM 2005, Unique Equilibria